The European Commission just put a target on the backs of the two biggest cloud providers in Europe. On June 25, the EU preliminarily designated Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as “gatekeepers” under the Digital Markets Act, a regulatory framework that forces dominant platforms to play nicer with competitors and customers alike.

What the DMA designation actually means

The preliminary designation stems from a market investigation the Commission launched on November 18, 2025. That probe scrutinized how AWS and Azure’s dominance in European cloud computing creates high switching costs and vendor lock-in for businesses that rely on their infrastructure.

The designation doesn’t require AWS and Azure to meet the DMA’s standard quantitative thresholds. Instead, the Commission used a qualitative assessment, essentially arguing that market position and switching costs alone justify the label.

Once designated, the obligations are substantial. Gatekeepers must ensure interoperability with competing services, enable data portability so customers can move their workloads elsewhere without prohibitive friction, and stop self-preferencing their own products over competitors’ offerings.

Both companies now have a window to respond before a final designation is issued. If that final ruling comes, compliance requirements would kick in within six months. No immediate fines have been mentioned. The Commission’s focus, for now, is on structural changes rather than punitive measures.

Why crypto should be paying attention

Cloud infrastructure was flagged as a priority area for enforcement in the Commission’s April 2026 DMA review, signaling this isn’t a one-off action but part of a sustained regulatory push. For crypto projects with significant European user bases or EU-incorporated entities, this creates a new variable in long-term infrastructure planning.

There’s also a narrative angle that decentralized cloud computing advocates will seize on immediately. Projects building distributed storage and compute networks, the Filecoin and Akash types of the world, have long argued that centralized cloud dependency is an existential risk for Web3. EU regulators essentially validating that concern, by calling out the market power and lock-in effects of AWS and Azure, hands those projects a talking point on a silver platter.

What this means for investors

Previous DMA designations targeting Alphabet, Amazon’s marketplace, Apple, and Meta led to significant compliance overhauls and, in some cases, changes to business models in the EU. The cloud designation follows the same playbook but targets a layer of infrastructure that sits beneath virtually every digital business, crypto included.